


If You Love Me (Let Me Know)

by ravenclaw13



Category: Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)
Genre: Angst, Drinking, Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-17
Packaged: 2018-09-18 01:44:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9360119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenclaw13/pseuds/ravenclaw13
Summary: In which Mark Darcy gets hammered and Daniel Cleaver finally does something right.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously non cannon. Set a few months after the end of the movie. Just so everyone knows I totally ship Bridget and Mark, I just thought this would be interesting to write. The title is from song. Thanks for reading!

Mark Darcy was sitting alone in his apartment. The light from the tv flooded his face and bathed the dark room in a faint white glow. There was a bottle of vodka on the floor, empty and lying on its side. Mark Darcy is not the kind of man who spends a Tuesday evening drinking alone in front of his television. In fact, Mark isn't really the kind of man who drinks at all. However, things had changed recently. 

He’d thought that he loved Bridget. She was kind and smart and unpredictable, to put it lightly. She cared about him, which wasn't something most people had bothered to do. When he’d kissed her in the snow that night he'd thought to himself “This is it, this is everything. Everything you've been waiting for and wanting and dreaming of. Love. Maybe even forever.”

But things had changed.   
_ 

It started one night, three months after Bridget moved into his apartment. She was snoring softly next to him as he stared at the ceiling. It was 3 am. He should have been asleep by then, he had work in the morning, a very important case, important people he needed to impress, the usual. But he couldn't sleep. All he could do was stare at the ceiling and see the same image he hadn't been able to get out of his mind for the last few hours. Daniel, after the fight, lying crumpled and bleeding in the street. Shards of glass all around him. 

It wasn’t that Daniel didn’t deserve the beating because he certainly did. What kind of best man steals the groom's wife? But, then again, it was Daniel. The same boy who’d dragged Mark along to all the hottest parties back in college. The same kid who charmed the librarian into letting Mark stay late to finish his paper. The same boy who used to get so drunk at that hole in the wall bar that he'd hold Mark’s hand, singing some crap pop song, as they walked back to campus. Cleaver had crossed a line when he’d slept with Mark’s wife, that wasn't debatable. And yet, deep down Mark knew there would always be that part of him that would forgive Daniel anything and ask for nothing in return. 

It took Bridget a couple weeks before she caught on and asked Mark about it. “I feel guilty because it was wrong of me to punch him. We’re adults, I should have handled it with more … grace.” He told her. But that really wasn't it at all.   
_

He’d broken up with her a few weeks after that. He couldn't keep leading her on, he had a moral compass, after all. So now here he was, drunk and alone. Watching tv in his suit at midnight on a fucking Tuesday. He would have told himself he was being pathetic if he thought his self - esteem could bear the criticism. 

He was so angry, so sad, so utterly alone. And before he could stop himself he was stumbling towards the phone. He felt his fingers moving towards that same pattern of numbers that he used to know by heart. He’d tried to forget them, after the incident. But they were burned in his memory, like everything else involving Daniel Cleaver. 

(He’d imagined once, when he was drunk off his ass in his second year of college, that when he died and they placed him flat on that metal table and opened up his chest there would be nothing there but the sound of Daniel’s laugh, filling that cold white room with life.) 

_

He’d called and Daniel had come. Just like in the old days. Back before everything when it was just the two of them alone, sitting cross-legged on the twin bed in Marcus’s dorm. Breathless and drunk and Daniel would lean in and Mark’s heart would stutter. But nothing would happen. He would pull away and if Mark looked disappointed, well, Daniel only laughed. 

But they weren’t playing games. Not anymore. They were both much too old and much too broken. Mark knew that. So, when Daniel came crashing through the door that Tuesday night Mark was only a little surprised when he didn't say a word, just grabbed Darcy and finished that almost kiss from 20 years ago.


End file.
